Texas scientists have used embryonic stem cells to heal a severely damaged artery in a baboon.

A team from the Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio, led by John L. VandeBerg, Ph.D., took embryonic stem cells from baboons to produce a fully functional artery.

To do this, the team extracted cells that line the surface of a part of an artery and replaced them with cells that were derived from embryonic stem cells. Both ends of the arterial segment were then connected to plastic tubing inside a bioreactor, which encourages cells to grow.

Fluid was then pumped through the artery under pressure to mimic blood, and a different fluid was then used to soak the outside of the artery. Only three days later, the inner surface began to regenerate, and after two weeks, the inside of the artery was completely restored to a functional state.

The team even stripped another artery without placing the stem cells inside to see if it was the stem cells that did the rejuvenating. The artery without the stem cells didn't heal and never became functional.

"We first cultured the stem cells in petri dishes under special conditions to make them differentiate into cells that are the precursors of blood vessels, and we saw that we could get them to form tubular and branching structures, similar to blood vessels," said VandeBerg. "Just think of what this kind of treatment would mean to a patient who had just suffered a heart attack as a consequence of a damaged coronary artery. And this is the real potential of stem cell regenerative medicine -- that is, a treatment with stem cells that regenerates a damaged or destroyed tissue or organ."

all we need are some folk extolling the virtues of healing crystals and bottles of distilled water (homeopathy).

to be blunt - your beliefs may well give you comfort, and aspects of them may well inadvertently be correct but there is a huge body of work made over the last 100 years ago that basically says that you are talking out of your ass.

eating different foods is NOT going to correct an age related deterioration in renal function. you are born with ~ 1 million nephrons in each kidney. if you lose one it is gone forever, it certainly isnt coming back because you've eaten some jojobo nuts dipped in lily tree oil.

it is stem cell research like that alluded to in the posting that holds the bext chance of a cure for these conditions where the body has sustained injury that it cannot regenerate from.

Changing diet and destressing / meditating is far from snake oil as you would have it. I take a number of items, milk thistle, cherry juice, fish oil, for both maintaining health and acceleration of recovery from trainning. The same items among others speed the recovery from diseases.

Doctors have either caused more harm than good or couldn't or wouldn't do anything.

if a particular lifestyle suits you, makes you feel better, makes you feel like you will live longer then go for it.

ive got no problem with that.

the issue is when people take their unvalidated anecdotal unscientific belief system and wrap it up in a load of pseudoscience to make it seem like level one evidence from a high quality randomised controlled trial.

here are two statements:

1: i eat milk thistle and cherry juice and it makes me feel better. im not sure why, but it feels so good i have to recommend it to you.

2: i eat milk thistle and cherry juice and works by cleansing the body helping the kidney work better (insert mock pseudoscience).... and hence i recommend this diet to you.

the approach is morally really quite corrupt for the second stance - taking known science, abusing and corrupting it to confuse and obfuscate quite often desperate people who are being bombarded with advice - some of it evidence based, most of completely un-evidence based.

this kind of pseudoscience creates FUD over the treatment of disease and can in certain circumstances be very dangerous. look up steve jobs' decision making on how to treat his cancer as an example of how these thought processes can hasten death.

i don't really understand your last sentence.

it seems on reading it to suggest that you feel doctors cause more harm than good. i dont want to get too bogged down in this but the massive increase in life span over the last century and abolition of so many diseases that have caused so much pain and misery over the last few thousand years seems to passed you by.

quote: the issue is when people take their unvalidated anecdotal unscientific belief system and wrap it up in a load of pseudoscience to make it seem like level one evidence from a high quality randomised controlled trial.

Ok, so tell me, how is an ordinary person supposed to conduct a 5 year scientific trial that meets your expectations? It just won't happen. The nearest I can do is a one person trial, which is exactly what I am doing, and what those other people are doing.

There are two really important issues that I can see with stem cells which you fail to account for:1) Do we need to kill someone to get them? Don't give me the "legally we aren't doing anything wrong" nonsense, Hitler made it legal to kill people like Gypsies, Jews, homosexuals, religious devotees, handicapped people, etc, but that doesn't make it right.I did some research on stem cells, and as far as I can tell it looks like it is on the border between right and wrong, which isn't good. As much as I don't like to suggest it, one needs to ask whether the purpose of stem cell research is to push the boundaries of what the public will accept as right and wrong.2) If the cause of the damage to the body was because of an unhealthy lifestyle, e.g. smoking, using "recreational" drugs, booze, etc, then how long will it be before the newly repaired parts of a person are starting to fail again and that person is back at the doctor with the same problem?Those are two really important issues, and you seem very happy to ignore them.To me, a much better approach to both of those problems would be to find ways to improve the way a body heals itself then that would avoid the need for stem cells completely.I heard this piece on the news last year about the oldest man in America eating KFC every day. Guess why this is interesting news, and guess why it didn't surprise me?

"Ok, so tell me, how is an ordinary person supposed to conduct a 5 year scientific trial that meets your expectations? It just won't happen. The nearest I can do is a one person trial, which is exactly what I am doing, and what those other people are doing."

of course, an individual with no medical training, no funding and no trial support cannot produce high quality scientific research.

thats why we have research departments in all major universities.

the individual cannot be expected to widely read the literature and produce their own considered opinion - this is why we have systematic reviews and metaanalyses.

the individual cannot even really be expected to read and understand the results of systematic reviews - this is why we have doctors - you pay them to do this work for you and you have to trust them to give you the best most honest advice.

if you dont have this sense of trust with your current doctor then i suggest you try to find another one. looking around trying to figure everything out yourself is frustrating and has a risk of causing harm (like steve jobs).

im not a specialist researcher in mesenchymal stem cells but i do know that there is a lot of FUD about stem cell research.

stem cells != embryonic stem cells

mesenchymal stem cells can be harvested from lots of different tissues - nothing has to die to produce them. there was an outcry about taking stem cells from embryos (which is very understandable) - however the overwhelming majority of stem cell research today does not involve any embryos. stem cells have been used for decades - e.g. a bone marrow transplant - a very common and old treatment for some cancers is essentially a transplant of multipotent stem cells.

with regard to eating a normal amount of a varied healthy diet, not smoking, not drinking too much and exercising regularly - this is common sense. you don't a doctor or anyone else to tell you that these are good things to do.

stem cell research (and by extension other research) is not being done so that we can live forever whilst chain smoking whilst guzzling down bucket after bucket of kfc.

its not an either/or situation. we should live nice clean healthy lifestyles and if research on top of that can produce treatments to further improve our quality of life then that can only be a good thing.

Yeah open to interpretation, but the other guy/gal was quite polite and argued well. This article was about the cutting edge of medical science and I too was taken aback at a post that seemed to say that the same effect could be achieved with diet. I don't wish to be drawn in but I just thought that you saying that he/she was not a doctor a bit off when they seemed to have a valid point.

Your interpretation is correct and it seems not in dispute, maybe the point was taken too literally.